Roc Studios

Hi @DoctorEncore. There's a few reasons I got into programming primarily for Pico-8: The number one reason I liked Pico-8 was how it limited project scope. There's multiple restrictions in place that helps prevent a project from growing out of control, which is something I ran into quite often as a newbie game dev . For example, a game's compressed cartridge size is limited to 32 kb. It helped me actually finish building games, even if they weren't much to look at. I had some familiarity with the Lua programming language at the time from working with Love 2d previously. Since Pico-8 essentially uses a limited subset of Lua, I found the transition to be pretty easy. Pico-8 is an all-in-one game development environment: you can code in it, draw sprites, create maps and write music/sfx without needing additional software. This, alongside Lua's soft learning curve and Pico-8's simplified library of functions, makes it easy for learning game dev. Lastly, the Pico-8 homebrew community is fairly sizable, and also incredibly friendly and helpful . I believe it's the most popular fantasy console out there. Celeste is one of the more well known games that was originally created in a game jam using Pico-8. Nowadays that I'm a bit more familiar with game dev, I actually really like using it for rapidly prototyping a game idea, to see if it's fun and worth building on a different framework/engine.

Thanks everyone!

Haha, thank you @FenrirZero for the warmest of welcomes .

Hi everyone! My name is Elias Mote. I'm migrating here from Nintendo Age, although to be honest I very rarely used the site (I lurked every now and then). I live over in California, where I've resided my entire life. I got into playing video games when I was 6 (SNES, NES and Genesis), and I've enjoyed them ever since. During the day, I do Quality Assurance testing for a software company, but I night I do game development. I've mostly worked with Pico-8 and Love 2d, but I'm hoping to eventually make at least 1 NES game. I'm mainly a programmer, but I touch on art and music just the tiniest bit whenever the need arises (I'm pretty bad at both to be honest). Anyway, it's great to be here, and I'm looking forward to being more involved in the community and getting to know people better. Thanks for reading this far, and have a wonderful day! Oh, and if you're interested in checking out any indie games that I've worked on, you can see them here http://rocstudios.net/category/games/